Seagate Technology LLC will likely introduce its own branded version of its new FATA drive later this year, a product that will be uniquely designed for entry-level servers, executives said Thursday at the Storage Networking World show here.
The Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) drives, developed jointly with Hewlett-Packard Co. and introduced earlier this week, initially will be sold and branded under the HP name.
The addition of the FATA drive came as a surprise to many in the industry, given that the enterprise storage market is already saturated with competing interfaces: the Ultra160 and Ultra320 SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI, Fibre Channel and Serial ATA.
But Seagate executives said FATA drives would primarily target entry-level servers. At the show here, Seagate also demonstrated multiple Serial ATA and SAS drives interoperating in the same enclosure, which could help simplify a storage design.
Put simply, FATA is a Fibre Channel interface bolted onto a Serial ATA-2 drive, according to Willis Whittington, senior manager of interface planning for the marketing and planning department of Seagate"s Enterprise Storage Group. "I"d call it a server-friendly Serial ATA," Whittington said.